Gay marriage little mentioned at faith confab

Paul and Reed were two who spoke at the Faith and Freedom Coalition's conference. | AP Photo

Gary Marx, the executive director of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, chalked up today’s light-on-marriage speeches to the uncertainty hovering over the Supreme Court proceedings. For senators to address various hypothetical rulings in advance, Marx said, would be “conjecture” and just “tremendously difficult.” (It’s worth noting many Republicans found no such difficulty last year in trumpeting an anticipated Supreme Court decision on the constitutionality of “Obamacare.”)

The conservative organizer noted that FFC members would be lobbying members of Congress this afternoon on issues including marriage, with the message to sympathetic lawmakers: “Get ready, this is coming.”

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“My guess is you’re going to see that dominate the news for a week or maybe more [after the decision], depending on whether a legislative remedy is called for,” Marx said.

Yet the question of how Republicans will handle gay marriage is one of the premier cultural challenges shadowing the party’s field of 2016 contenders, including Rubio and Paul. A Washington Post/ABC News poll this week found 57 percent of Americans now support legalizing gay marriage – a rapid shift reflected across national polling.

The event Thursday did little to resolve how Rubio and Paul will massage the issue of marriage for 2016, except by talking about other things more vigorously.

In different settings, Paul has suggested that his party embrace a “federalist approach” – as he put it in a Vice interview published this week – on “the cultural issues.” During a May trip to Iowa, the Kentucky senator told a conservative crowd that by making marriage a state issue, Republicans could avoid a nationwide turn toward legal same-sex unions.

Rubio hasn’t gone quite as far, but in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year, he defended the right of states “to define marriage in a traditional way.”

Of course, if the four brand-name legislators in attendance Thursday went easy on the marriage talk, they also surely recognized that they were among friends, and that the audience would be more likely to praise them for what they did say than fault them for what they did not.

Steve Scheffler, the taciturn Republican National Committee member from Iowa, said after the speeches that he sensed no lack of support for the conservative view of marriage.

“I think Rubio talked about it quite a bit. Sen. Lee did too,” said Scheffler, who said the speakers were “all pretty good” before adding: “I don’t agree with Sen. Rubio on the immigration issue.”